In terms of humans being hunters, this was the idea of anthropologists back in the 1950's and you had natural history museums with cavemen and man the hunter/killer and marks on bones were from injuries in war and so forth. Because we think about nothing but war we impose war on our prehistory where it didn't exist and we now know that the marks on the bones of our ancient ancestors are from the teeth of large cats and that we were dinner. We were not the hunter, we were the hunted until humans killed off many of the large animals.
And so, you know, in our history is the ability to fight. Also in our history, necessarily, is the ability to cooperate and to love and when you and others write about why it is that we like watching fictional dramas about sociopaths and it's because they get to be mean and greedy and grab power and get away with it, and isn't that fun? Well, there's a lot of truth to that, but being a good person, being generous, being loving, being self-sacrificing is also hugely enjoyable and fun. And when I look at somebody like Donald Rumsfeld trying to explain his crimes in this new movie, sociopathic behavior regardless of what his genes might be, he doesn't look happy to me. He looks miserable. And so I think there's something to noting the goodness in humanity as well.
When it comes to this question of who makes war and why do we make war, I mean, at this moment one thing is clear. There is a huge gap between what the US government does in making war and what the governments of the other 95% of humanity do; that the US government spends many times on war and does many times more to make wars that anybody else. So the question for you, Rob, is why? Is it because we've got more sociopaths? Is it because the relatively small number of sociopaths have managed to take over the government and control everybody else? Because none of those other countries have the sort of sociopath control system that you're hoping for. What they have is human control systems that cover the sociopaths and everybody else, and prevent these sorts of evil behaviors regardless of people's emotional state...which I think is the most important thing we need. I would love to have greater research on sociopaths, but we need political reform much more urgently regardless.
Rob: Well, I think we can have both. Let me do a station ID....this is the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show WNJC 1360 AM out of Washington Township, reaching Metro Philly and South Jersey, sponsored by opednews.com. If you're jumping into the middle of this conversation, you can catch the recording of it at iTunes. Look for my name Rob Kall, or go to opednews.com/podcasts and you'll find...just give it a day or two to come up on the site and a couple hundred other interviews with really interesting, smart people.
We're talking about psychopaths and sociopaths, and what to do about them or not do about them. David, I agree with you. We need laws that protect people in general. But it gets back to this question I started to raise about hierarchy, about control and domination. The ultimate control and domination was a transition that developed about 10, 12,000 years ago when people started owning land and shifting from hunter/gathering, which I think was mostly gathering, to domesticating animals and then domesticating people, because it wasn't long after civilization that we had slavery. And I've come to think that the people who dominated in the early civilizations and throughout history...you've got to wonder about them. You know, I think there is an extreme example of it in the movie Game of Thrones. I don't know. Have you watched that show?
DS: No, I'm afraid I haven't.
Rob: Okay, well it's been really popular. There's a...they have a king there who is the most horrific monstrous person you can imagine. I won't do any spoilers, but he is so bad. It's just disgusting how totally, sickly, evil he is and the pleasure he gets out of meanness and doing terribly, horribly and unkind things to people. I think he's an extreme example, but I think that power, as Lord Acton said, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And we have a system where there's too much power concentrated in too small a group of people. And maybe what we'll find out as we understand this is that we've got to stop that kind of a system. My favorite member of congress is the socialist Bernie Sander, and I've come to recognize that I'm probably a socialist in the way I think. I think that what you're talking about are huge, systemic changes that have to happen and I'm with you on that. I just also think that some of the way that we can get there is by getting people to have a better understanding about how they are hurt, how they are manipulated and influenced by people. Then you really don't even have to identify who they are necessarily, you just have to identify the kind of things that they do. And I think that's happening. II think more and more people are talking about it. Now that I've gotten into it, I'm starting to see more and more articles about psychopaths and sociopaths. You know, like Joel Bakan wrote the book and then made the movie The Corporation. Are you familiar with that?
DS: Yes.
Rob: I asked him how has the invention of corporations changed people. And he says that, basically, people are starting to embrace the same values as corporations and corporations -- I think he's shown pretty clearly -- corporations are designed and built to be psychopathic in the way they function. Any argument there?
DS: No, I completely agree as I said in my article that you called me about and thankfully encouraged me to write. I think CEOs are...every pressure is on them to behave in an evil manner and it doesn't matter whether they have good or bad genes. That's how they're going to behave or they're not going to stay a CEO. Democracy Now yesterday, Matt Taibbi on describing the horrendous crimes of the bankers and the billionaires who just don't face law enforcement while law enforcement goes viciously after the poorest for the most trivial offenses. I agree 100%. I doubt very much that every banker can genetically be identified as some sort of evil being, while perhaps some of them can, others can't; but if they're going to be a top banker in this sort of evil system, they're going to behave in an evil manner.
And I completely agree that we've concentrated too much power in terms of our plutocracy and in terms of political system in too few hands. That begins with one set of hands in the white house. We've created a monarchy and when these presidents and their immediate subordinates commit awful crimes, they need to be prosecuted and punished as anyone else and even more so because they have more power and the crimes are greater. Regardless of whether they really mean well and are sorry for their evil deeds in their heart of hearts, as everyone likes to imagine Obama, or they begin as a vicious torturer of frogs in their childhood and deserve any punishment they can get as people like to think of Bush. I think we have to punish based on the crimes; and there are crimes committed by these people at the top in our system.
I had a woman on my radio show recently -- you might want to have for a guest, Rob -- named Elaine Scarry who has a book just out called, Thermonuclear Monarchy, that makes the argument that when nuclear weapons were invented and they were placed in the hand of a single individual, the U.S. President, who has this suitcase that travels around with him and he can push a button and destroy life on earth. Power was taken, therefore, out of the hands of the congress or the courts or the public. People begin thinking in those terms about non nuclear wars, about other important decisions. They began thinking the President must make decisions on his own, he must be king. And we've been thinking that way much more than we had previously ever since 1945. And I think there's something to that argument and to the potential benefit of getting rid of nuclear weapons, aside from preventing the increasing risk of nuclear holocaust. Getting rid of nuclear weapons might enable us to start thinking of Presidents as human beings...as human beings than gods.
Rob: Well, I think that's part of the syndrome of wanting to have one person to solve all our problems, which is the way most of our movies go where you've got one superhero of some sort who does everything and saves everybody else. I think that nuclear power is this ultimate top-down fantasy. You hear people say, 'Oh, we should nuke them,' rather than talk to them and rather than make peace with them. And I think that Ward Wilson has written brilliant stuff about how nuclear power...nuclear weapons don't even work and never have. I don't know if you're familiar with his work, but you should have him on your show. This nuclear thing is definitely an example of just how bad it can get and how somebody who is not insane and psychopathic could actually push the button or order this to happen. It's kind of like a mass insanity of some sort.
I think you really raise some good questions in your article that I wanted to get into...about how people who are not psychopaths allow psychopaths to set the policies and implement decisions. How does that happen? How do we let this go on? I think part of the problem is our educational system which is awful and which basically trains people to be obedient and complacent, and to just sit back and enjoy the television shows and playing games and video games. We've got to break out of that.
But I think one of the things that this conversation is helping to gel for me is the idea that what we've been...look, with the years we've had Obama, the peace movement has been almost neutralized. There's so little effort going into it because everybody thinks, "Oh, he's a democrat!" That's been a disaster. We need to come up with some alternative ways to try to address these problems that we have that are huge problems in this world. I think that one way to do it is to start looking at the bad guys and understanding how they manipulate people, how they affect people, how they get that way, and try to explore from understanding those...the answers to those questions, maybe alternative solutions. And I agree with you, it's very premature to have any solutions right now, but I think that we've got to be asking a lot more questions and that's where we really are at this point.
DS: Well I agree, I always agree with asking more questions, for sure, and I think that we have a system set up that facilitates concentrating power and wealth. And it takes an enormous effort for anyone within the system or from the outside to push back in the other direction. People are trained by their televisions and their media to be disempowered. We have the opposite of a small D-democratic communications system apart from websites and shows like yours. The huge corporate media outlets train people every day to think they cannot possibly and they shouldn't try to influence their government, even though it actually is much easier to do it than people imagine to get involved in the government. To run for public office at the national level, the congressional level in this country you have to be a money grubber. you have to be willing to beg for money from wealthy people all day every day. You have to devote your hours to that. It'd have to consume your life and good people detest that kind of behavior, that kind of selling out of your soul. I mean you have to be willing to behave as a pretty despicable person to run for office in the United States. You know, I know some very good people who have done it, usually unsuccessfully, but it's a huge hurdle that weeds out most of the most talented and moral individuals. So, you're down to a field of people who are willing to sell their soul to the devil for candidates for public office. Some of them may be genetically sociopaths and others not. I don't know how to define that or much less how to investigate it, but you've got a field that doesn't include most of the really good people, a lot of whom are activists and journalists and radio hosts and website organizers who are trying to push in a better direction and are up against the hurdle of a public that believes it can't have any impact and shouldn't try.
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